I use the animal as a vehicle. I rock the horse forward and drive the cattle home. If I’m reading the folds of a toilet, I might notice a small box full of ancient golf courses and in this way prepare for the donkey’s future.

You might want to observe the decorum of self-sustaining ranch wannabes or you might just visit the sand-colored pueblo without any trousers. Either way, the furniture stays, anomalous as a purple February.

Still, a variety of wildlife is not the same thing as a choice of jeeps and you can’t fly no matter which former reptile you choose to anticipate. You just can’t become a bird because the bird is locked in your throat.

I use the window as an accident, and I write down what should have happened. This forms the wire substructure for the verbal taxidermy. It’s not an original method but I distort with the wing vents of my chosen lizard and chew loudly to make dinner at home more exciting. This way several different genres participate in the unfolding. I can’t tell you which ones because they visit at random. It depends on how much the window is open and, well, what’s out there.

Then I cut loose the ovoid canisters and facilitate the removal of extraneous nesting matter. If I think too hard about the reasons, they go away, but if I don’t think at all, they harden and the substructure becomes brittle and nearly useful.

That’s why blind faith doesn’t interest me. That’s why the adventure is accomplished without the intervention of inanimate objects or extraneous napping. That’s why modulating a fragile protective covering, playful but dark in emotional content, rendered with a flexible avian vocabulary and a childish sophistication, seems to proportion the relevant measuring utensils.

Here, take this insect for example. It has legs and it can swim. To prove a point, I once ate breakfast off of it. It lends a certain uncertainty to the aura of performance I suspected I was establishing. Most of the time it does absolutely nothing. But it’s alive. Sooner or later I’m going to have to kill it. But not till after I’ve finished using it.

- Rich Ives